Peer-to-peer
P-to-P technologies create new models of knowledge sharing
IF A TECHNOLOGY considered more disruptive to business than peer-to-peer file sharing exists — as seen by the effort to ban corporate access to sites such as Gnutella and Napster — then it has done an excellent job of covering its tracks. Although many questions concerning the security and architecture of p-to-p have yet to be answered, it is clear that p-to-p technologies are already having an effect on business collaboration — and on major platforms vendors, including Sun and Microsoft, who are building peer services into Jxta and Windows XP, respectively.
Customer service is a particularly appealing area for companies to experiment with p-to-p, given the positive experience of many companies that outsource this function. Anyone who has looked for customer support on the Web knows what a painful process it can be; too often it winds up being a matter of punching in some keywords and hoping. Using p-to-p technologies, companies can deliver immediate, personalized support over the Web while making efficient use of support reps.
For example, Quiq’s collaborative platform, Quiq Connect, allows the mass reuse of service events, dynamically populating the general knowledge pool so that customers can help themselves to solutions to old problems while support reps focus on solving new ones. Quiq Connect can even “federate” knowledge bases from multiple vendors, or different support groups within a vendor, so that they present a seamless whole, allowing business partners to better support customers with complex problems, such as computer hardware and software interoperability issues.
Unfortunately for p-to-p purists, the security concerns of potential customers, along with some basic physical constraints, mean that a completely serverless environment — à la Gnutella — won’t be a big hit with business. Instead, we foresee more widespread acceptance of hybrid products that allow peered clients to pull data as needed from the closest peer, while pushing changes back to a central location for archiving and management.
A tough economic climate ordinarily might stifle the introduction of drastically new technologies such as p-to-p collaboration, but it may be now or never for companies seeking to extract the last possible competitive advantage from their knowledge and experience.
